WILL PARRISH: California’s Thirsty Wine-Grapes

In the San Joaquin Valley heartland town of Livingston, located along Highway 99 between Turlock and Merced, the United States’ most lucrative wine corporation, E&J Gallo, operates the world’s largest winery: a place where serried ranks of massive, 200,000-gallon tanks tower over the surrounding countryside, in a compound ringed by security fences.

Were California its own nation, its wine industry would be the world’s fourth largest in terms of revenue. Roughly 570,000 acres in the state are under the vine, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture (which chairman, incidentally, was president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers for 13 years). And about half of that acreage is located in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, which operate in conjunction with the area’s enormous industrial wineries.

Much of this grape-based alcohol production is enabled by California’s unparalleled water infrastructure, which transmits water from north to south, thereby turning the arid lands that supply Gallo’s oil refinery-like facility into a bountiful — and profitable — farming region. On the other side of the Coast Ranges, and further north, resides another thirsty portion where the wine industry places inordinate demand on its watersheds.

As the American wine market moved increasingly upscale in the 1990s, Sonoma County emerged as an epicenter of the “premium grape rush” due to its wide variety of favorable microclimates and soils, as well as comparatively low land prices vis-a-vis Napa County to the east. In keeping with the prevailing market trend toward high-end varietal wines, a new division of the Gallo empire — Gallo of Sonoma — amassed a collection of sprawling estates in the verdant hills ranging north to south from Cloverdale to Sonoma

The Gallo clan aimed not only to remake their company’s image; they were intent on remaking Sonoma County’s physical terrain in that image. Throughout much of the 1990s, Gallo’s fleet of D-9 excavators rumbled across the company’s vast tracts, steel mandibles akimbo, cleaving oaks and pines and Doug firs from their root systems. Gallo owns about 6,000 acres in Sonoma County in all.

Erected in the mid-1990s, the Gallo of Sonoma Winery consists not of one wine production factory, but eight. It features not merely a large aging cellar, but one that spans the length of a football field. It is capable of producing not simply an enormous volume of wine, but 4.7 million cases of it annually — enough pinot noir, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, and merlot to fill 17 Olympic-sized swimming pools. At a cost of more than $100 million, the facility was one of the largest construction projects in the history of the California North Coast, a veritable Taj Majal to the premium wine boom.

And this facility, along with the sprawling wine-grape acreage that sustains it, relies on a massive volume of water.

As California’s historic drought lurches into a fifth year, the outsized demand that the state’s agribusiness sector places on its water resources (and water is, indeed, commonly regarded as a “resource”) is receiving greater attention. Almonds, alfalfa and pistachios have been singled out for much of the criticism, particularly because almonds command roughly 8% of California’s developed water supply and much of the overall harvest is being exported overseas.

In recent weeks, California Governor Jerry Brown has defended his decision to mandate that towns and cities slash water consumption by 25% compared to 2013 levels, while sparing those who consume the most: agribusinesses. Brown has argued that many California farmers are already facing water cutbacks because of the historic drought.

When questioned by ABC’s Martha Raddatz about the fact that agriculture uses 80% of California’s available water, while generating only about 2% of the state’s economic output, California’s governor replied: “Yeah, you bet it’s true. But by the way, they’re not watering their lawn or taking longer showers. They’re providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America.”

Vineyards are not producing a food crop that “feeds the world,” but they remain exempt from the mandatory rationing now underway in California. And they are using an amount of water that even Rodney Strong, patriarch of a famous eponymous wine label in Healdsburg, referred to as “horrendous” in a University of California Oral History interview, in which he described the introduction of irrigation techniques that increased profits and yields beginning in the early-1970s.

Since then, the Russian River basin has been altered to suit any and all individuals wishing to grow grapes. In a 2007 study, the consulting firm Stetson Engineering estimated that there are more than 800 illegal water reservoirs in the Russian River basin alone, out of a total of roughly 1,700 in the North Coast region of Marin, Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties (this includes the Eel River). The capacity of these water impoundments is 48,515 acre-feet, amounting to 3,234 surface acres of illegal reservoirs.

Extrapolating from the Stetson Engineering study, it’s likely that the Russian River has more illegal diversions than any other California river system. It’s safe to say most of the diversions are for vineyards. The diversions submerge stream reaches and headwaters, thereby drying up spawning habitat critical to fish.

As Arcata-based fisheries biologist Patrick Higgins observes, these “reservoirs are ideal habitat for bull frogs, which decimate native amphibian populations. They are often stocked with warmwater game fish that escape into water bodies below and may predate upon salmonids or displace them through competition.”

If the problem of illegal water impoundments that destroy fish and frog habitat sounds familiar, it’s probably because everyone from the County Supervisors to the local Congressman to the Department of Water Resources to the regional corporate media have been focused on the problem vis-a-vis the marijuana industry.

With respect to the wine industry, the problem has eluded attention.

Back to Gallo, which accounts for one of the Russian River’s only well-studied illegal diversions. In one case, Gallo constructed an 8.2 surface-acre pit reservoir to capture the headwaters of a Dry Creek (Russian River tributary, with much of its watershed in Mendocino County) feeder stream, located at its properties at 8900 and 9015 Westside Roads, near Healdsburg. This reservoir has a capacity of 250 acre-feet and a reported depth of 45 feet. The water was diverted from the Russian River, approximately one mile away, and pumped uphill to fill the reservoir. After it had operated for nearly two decades, the Water Board finally cracked down.

The powerful tend to set the terms of debate, and the wine industry is indeed powerful. As case after case has shown, the wine industry tends to get its way with respect to water, zoning, labor laws, subsidies, wind fans, and more. As a crude reflection of that power, Darwin Bond-Graham and I studied the wine industry’s lobbying activities and campaign contributions as compared to California’s agribusiness sector as a whole (“How Wine Rules,” AVA, July 27, 2011).

Among California agribusiness lobbying organizations, the Farm Bureau (effectively equivalent to the wine industry in Mendocino County) gave the most money to political campaigns, according to 2009-10 CA Secretary of State data. The Wine Institute of San Francisco (of which the president is none other than George W. Bush’s brother-in-law, Robert Koch) came in second. The California Association of Wine-grape Growers (CAWG) landed fourth on the list. Of agribusiness four biggest campaign donor entities, two represent the wine industry. Suffice it to say wine is possibly the largest, most coherent interest group funding North Coast and North Bay politics.

The consequences for our local water supply are enormous. More on this in the weeks to come.
~~

Yes I do. The organization that I work for, Forest Unlimited, has for many years opposed this conversion of forestland to vineyards. We specifically, with the help of others, opposed the vineyard on Westside Rd. mentioned in Will’s article. Unfortunately, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors has provided the agricultural industry (read wine industry) carte blanc with regard to environmental review. By ordinance, they decreed that all Ag developments receive a “Negative Declaration”. This, they claim, relieves them from doing an Environment Impact Report (EIR) in which the public can participate. We think that this is illegal. There is a lawsuit contesting it under review by the Sonoma County Superior Court as I write. If their obscene law is overturned, we may actually gain a legal handle which we can use to hold the industry accountable.

Thanks for the research work and the article. California is leading the world in much innovation in tech and environmental consciousness so one likes to believe, but how are the scales actually balanced between good and bad is not easy to answer.
This an environmental elephant in the room, no one wants to mention. ? the Golden States’s future. The planet as a whole.

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Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. ~Robert Ingersoll

All religion is a foolish answer to a foolish question. ~Thomas Shelby

The strongly religious fear our capacity for moral reasoning that does not require a magical, invisible deity. They fear our ability to be ethical without the threat of hell or the reward of heaven. They fear that our allegiance is not to this or that country, or this or that prophet, or this or that guru, but to humanity as a whole. ~Phil Zuckerman

The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat is surely, from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn’t he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured? ~Richard Dawkins

Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon

All religions are lies and scams, and all believers are victims. ~David Silverman

We [atheists] have no martyrs, we have no saints. ~Christopher Hitchens

Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. ~H L Mencken

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion. ~Jon Stewart

My 12th year was my most Christian and most boring year in my life. ~Chuck Berry

Come on. You just can’t come up with anything more ridiculous than someone who honestly thinks that all human woes stem from an incident in which a talking snake accosted a naked woman in a primeval garden and talked her into eating a piece of fruit. ~Keith Parsons

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

Christians don’t need to be born again, they need to grow up. ~John Shelby Spong

Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced. ~Alan Watts

Society is like a stew: If you don't stir it up every now and then, the scum rises to the top.~Edward Abbey

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~Buckminster Fuller

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one. ~ Richard Dawkins

I’m not saying there isn’t a god, but there isn’t a god who cares about people. And who wants a god who doesn’t give a shit? ~Robert Munsch

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. ~Arthur C. Clarke

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death
while praying for a fish. ~ Anon

When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ~ Stephen Roberts

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. ~ Joseph Campbell

The only true definition of an atheist: a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in God or gods. ~Oxford English Dictionary

You have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Faith is just another word for gullibility.

I sang as one / Who on a tilting deck sings / To keep men's courage up, though the wave hangs / That shall cut off their sun. ~C. Day Lewis

Resilience Tools (Basic)

Freethought/Stoics

Religion Divides

The Wikipedia of Christian Terrorism (Link)

Books of the Freethinkers Bible

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this because some genes are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria. And, above all, the genetic code itself — the dictionary by which all genes are translated — is the same across all living creatures that have ever been looked at. We are all cousins. Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth? And the most wonderful thing of all is that we know for certain it is literally true...

The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye — and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all! In fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. They don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or anesthetics. In fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them! If these 'holy books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all-knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things? -Richard Dawkins

Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws… It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such.

I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? -Zora Neale Hurston

Democratic Socialism

Socialist Alternative is the organization that spearheaded the campaign to elect Kshama Sawant to Seattle City Council, the first independent socialist elected in a major U.S. city in decades. We are a national organization fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We are community activists fighting against budget cuts in public services; we are activists campaigning for a $15/hour minimum wage and fighting, democratic unions; we are people of all colors speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia.

We believe the Republicans and Democrats are both parties of big business, and we are campaigning to build an independent, alternative party of workers and young people to fight for the interests of the millions, not the millionaires.

We see the global capitalist system as the root cause of the economic crisis, poverty, discrimination, war, and environmental destruction. As capitalism moves deeper into crisis, a new generation of workers and youth must join together to take the top 500 corporations into public ownership under democratic control to end the ruling elites’ global competition for profits and power.

We believe the dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were perversions of what socialism is really about.

We are for democratic socialism where ordinary people will have control over our daily lives.

An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated. ~Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Founder

In the history of the world, the number of times a supernatural anything has been proven true is zero. Every god, ghost, spirit, devil, possession, and miracle ever claimed true is a lie. No exceptions. The number of times an atheistic (godless) argument has been proven wrong by a theistic argument is zero... In contrast, every time a theist-versus-atheist argument has been settled, an atheistic argument has won. This does not mean science is antireligion; it just means (or rather, strongly implies) religion is wrong... I challenge anyone to find any scientifically valid testable proof of anything supernatural, ever. If you can prove it, even once, I'll quit my job. I'm not nervous, as it has never been done in history, because it's ALL a lie. ~David Silverman, President

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman